Temporary Services, Designated Drivers, installation photograph

Now based in Chicago,Copenhagen, and Philadelphia – Temporary Services is comprised of Brett Bloom, Salem Collo-Julin and Marc Fischer. They are known for their production of exhibitions, events, projects, and publications and inherent in their work is the blurred line between art practice and other creative human endeavor. Started in 1998 as an experimental exhibition space in a working class neighborhood of Chicago, their name directly reflects the desire to provide art not as a sellable object, but as a service to others. The focus of Temporary Services was – and still is – the social context in which art is produced and received.

For their exhibition at The University Galleries, Temporary Services presents three works: Designated Drivers, Interactive Records, and a Booklet Cloud. For Designated Drivers, Temporary Services invited an international selection of twenty people and groups to each fill one four-gigabyte USB flash drive with material of their choosing. The invited participants for Designated Drivers have included mountains of material, much of which cannot be found duplicated online. During the exhibition, visitors will be able to load their own drives or laptops (or use a host computer and CDrs or DVDrs) with any of the material they would like from each of the flash drives mounted on the wall. File types include: MP3, JPEG, PNG, AIFF, TIFF, PSD, WORD DOCs, PPT, MPEG, PDF, AVI, and more.

Interactive Records is collection of vinyl LPs that are designed in ways that champion participation, action, and a level of involvement beyond listening. Some of the records are packaged like portable exhibitions. This exhibition will mark the first showing of this collection that Temporary Services has been assembling for several years.

Self-publishing is a central component of Temporary Services’ work and Booklet Cloud is a survey of some of the over 90 publications that the group has made in the past 14 years. As is the practice of the group, a new free booklet will be produced for this exhibition. For more on the work of Temporary Services, visit [www.temporaryservices.org]